Discussion

Pig cheese?

This is a really odd question but I have always wondered why cheese made from pig's milk does not exist (or if it does why is it not widely consumed). There is yalk cheese, buffalo cheese, goat and sheep cheese...but why no pig cheese?

I'm a big fan of head cheese, especially the spicy variety. I asked the deli guy in my local market why they didn't have head cheese and he said it was because slicing it grossed everybody out! For heaven's sake.

I love head cheese as well. I put all jellied meat terrine preparations into the headcheese class, even if they don't have head meat in them. There are so many different types. I think the blood and tongue is great one, so smotth, lush and rich. Also suelze, which has vinegar and finely chopped peppers is really great too, with a bit of a tang to go with the meat. I make a sort of brawn, an English term, which is homemade style of headcheese terrine. The French call it fromage de tete.

I'm going to have so much fun when this winter as I work on recipes for a charcuterie/smokehouse I will be opening next spring.

Can't reply directly to you JMF, so I'll reply to myself! I make a reasonable facsimile with just pig's feet. The jelly produced by them is unbelievably stiff. You could play catch with that stuff. I like vinegar in it too.

If you ever had to clean a slicer after slicing head cheese, or worse, souse, you would empathize with the employees. It's very sticky and hard to remove, and you certainly can't slice anything else without the residue getting all over the next meat.

I eat it like lunch meat - several slices along with other meat - on a sandwich. The brand I've been buying of late has a coarse chop, and low proportion of gelatin. A thick knife slice would weigh close to 1/4 pound, and be overly chewy. Other styles might be better as thick slices, but I prefer this thin.

You know, in the above link, there is a link to wikipedia describing the different versions of headcheese. Some countries DO call it pig cheese. So I wasn't so off when I thought this post might be about headcheese.

Head cheese can be made from many cuts of meat, and don't need to come from the head. We made head cheese with chicken, pork and veal, adding a dusting of gelatin between layers, it was gently simmered in a dish towel, then pressed under a weight. The presence of gelatin was virtually non-existent. The finished product was beautiful layered solid meat. Great stuff!

Think of the animals that most of the cheese comes from ... they have those udders full of milk ... no udder, not a lot of milk. Cows have the biggest udders ... therefor, most of the cheese gets made from it.

Gosh, I thought you just came up with another name for headcheese and was thinking ... awful name ... then again, that could answer the pig cheese question ... it was hard enough to get people to accept goat cheese.

How can "They don't produce a lot of milk" possibly be true? They raise 8 to 12 offspring to what mass in what time? They may have less milk volume than a cow, but certainly no less than a goat. We have goat cheese....

As a child growing up, I can vividly remember my German grandma boiling a pig's head in a big pot on the stove, starting her prep for head cheese. Might have scared some kids off the stuff, but I love it (the homemade variety, anyway) to this day.

My Irish grandma, on the other hand, called such food "trough slop" (even while she proceeded to boil some mystery gray meat herself).